It's nice to see a lack of votes for Apathetics, but then again none of them would probably be reading this blog anyway! (Reply: you are probably right.) I'm impressed by the turnout at the polls though.

This topic came up on an earlier, unrelated thread, when the final postings wandered away from the original subject.

It was stated that the word "denier" was originally intended to be a slur. It was intended to equate those who questioned the seriousness of Global Warming with those who deny that Hitler killed six million Jews. It was intended to ostracize and silence people who dared oppose the so-called "consensus." Rather than the slur shaming people, they embraced the term, (in the same manner colonial patriots embraced the term "Yankee," which was originally intended to be a slur.) The term "denier" became a badge of honor.

It was also stated that the term "alarmist" was a slur and should be replaced by the term "asserter." Such a PC change of termonology was then called a watering-down of the fact that alarmists truely feel alarmed by the future they foresee. They ought see the term "alarmist" as a badge of honor. It remains to be seen if their alarm makes them like Paul Revere or like Chicken Little, but if they truely feel they are warning fellow man of impending disaster, they should feel proud to be called "alarmists," for raising the alarm is justified.

It only muddies the waters to nit-pick about what to call the "sides" in this debate. We all "assert" certain points, we all "deny" the validity of other points, and hopefully we are all "skeptics" in the positive manner which promotes scientific debate and keenness of vision.

For the purposes of our discussion I think the terms "alarmist" and "denier" do just fine.

It would be nice to believe that this is an actual representative of the population and they would stand up to the politicians and say Enough!, no new legislation until there is hard evidence!
Alas I think the spinmiesters have the upper hand and the new laws that will come to pass in the next year or so will have very negative consequences for our dreams and prosperity.

Proof that you can get whatever poll results you want, if you word the questions properly.

The price of eggs, butter and milk rose at the fastest rate since records began last year, official figures show.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0BEZHEP4HCG0XQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/16/nprices216.xml&posted=true&_requestid=155663

We are running out of food and converting farmland to biofuels production. It should make many polar bears happy to know that we are willing to sacrifice humans in order to pretend we are solving a non-existent problem.

I prefer the term global warming heretic.

The actual amount of human caused global warming is quite small. The idea that humans can regulated the Earths temperature 70 years in the future is quite silly.

On the other hand, developing and providing non polluting, renewable energy sources should be a priority.

Even if we can't agree on the problem perhaps we can agree on a solution.

The trouble with global warming, or should we say climate change is that you have to look in history. Back in 1975 Newsweek had an article stating that global cooling is apon us and we have to start correcting our polluting ways. Back then it was cooling and now its warming. This whole issue is based on politics and more government control. Its more like a religious movement where if you don't agree with their belief in climate change your a bad person. Al Gore is the head of a new marxist religious movement called climate change and will not stop until our great nation turns into a socialist nation with limited freedoms and more government intervention.

OT,

Just found this little nugget concerning the Greenland ice sheet melt rates. I find the last sentence especially interesting.

We combine this empirical relationship with historic temperature data to infer that the melt-day area of the western part of the ice sheet doubled between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and that the largest ice sheet surface melting probably occurred between 1920s and 1930s, concurrent with the warming in that period. (highlighting is mine)

This can't possibly be happening when we are now experiencing unprecedented warming on a scale that hasn't been seen in the past millennium.

And you wonder why I'm skeptical.

Hopefully many of the people who responded will also become regular contributors.

Reply: I agree. That would be great!

Went from a believer to a skeptic.
Just too many fudge factors, adjustments, math errors, badly written or reasoned articles and a shameful peer review process. Conflicts of interest abound and that leads to skepticism in the accuracy of the data.

Climatology is a very young discipline trying to become a science and all are vying for their moment in the sun. I dare say that unless the world had the spectrum of the Apocalypse hanging over its head, Climate Science and scientists would be relegated to relative obscurity. Do any of you really think this group of people want that to happen? It’s all about power, ego and money. Remember: “Follow the money!”

Chris Crawford:
As for “No theory or hypothesis in human history has been proven……….”

Ahhh A direct quote Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”….and it was done without a footnote or quote. Bad form.(Some of us skeptics can actually read) He was referring to theories as models for his theoretical ideas.

You could be right. Calling the AGW Theory is wrong. We may be giving it too much credence.

Maybe we should call it the “AGW Hypothesis”, which is a “guess based on observation”

Show me the science without the double talk and hedges, be willing and forthcoming to answer questions without trying to impugn the questioners motives or source of income and maybe then I will become a believer.
Until the time that AGW can stand in the glare of unfettered scientific scrutiny, it is just a hypothesis.

Interesting..it's turned into a pseudonormal distribution which we probably should see....

fascinating...

I am a skeptic, of Global Warming, not of Global Climate change. The first is an hypothesis, the second is a fact.
Jim

Wow, there really is a consensus on this issue!

Include me in the Skeptic category.

My own take on the climate change debate would be a continuous spectrum between the "catastrophists" at one extreme and "pragmatists" at the other.

The "catastrophist" is defined by supporting a human induced global meltdown through industrial CO2 emissions, always the prime driver, rather than changing land use ie destroying the equatorial rainforests, these being real but secondary concerns. The world economy is enemy number one in this view and the tools of trade in propagating the catastrophy view are alarm and most importantly, guilt.Consumers are culpable.That's everyone in the developed world.Peversely they oppose solutions that are mainstream technological, nuclear and clean carbon.

This view can be used to push the specific agendas of a whole bunch of "enviromentalists" whose end points range from Nihilism to Utopianism. Al Gore would locate in the well meaning centre ground.You don't need to be bad to be a catastrophist.

The "pragmatist" sees the debate as just another problem for mankind, because either, it's not a problem ie even the IPCC science suggests we are not "doomed",
or if it is "our" problem leading to serious consequences then we are equipped through our(world) economic system to deal with it. If it makes economic sense to re-inforce sea defences that will happen, as it already has in the past.
Simply it is about how we choose to prioritise and allocate resources. I'd say Bjorn Lomborg might fall into this camp.

So there you have it,for what it's worth, written a twenty minute drive from the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, in Derbyshire, United Kingdom.

Polls, common wisdom or shared ignorance?

More interesting than a poll would be a correlation between what group one was in and how knowledgeable one is about the actual science (eg Hansen, Pearce, Barrette, Gelbspan, Rohm).

It seems to me that there is a strong correlation between the two, with the more knowledgeable tending to be proponents, and conversely the less you know the more likely you are to be a skeptic.

While this would not demonstrate cause/effect it would be easy to go on and frame a testable hypothesis and run the experiment ... THAT would be much more interesting.

Caleb writes:

For the purposes of our discussion I think the terms "alarmist" and "denier" do just fine.

Only if you want to prejudice the discussion in favor of your beliefs. Here, let's consider some other possible terminology.

For deniers, why not use:
antis
cons
dismissers
nixers
ostriches
thumbs-downers
grasshoppers (as in Aesop's fable)
scientifically illiterate
naive optimists

And for asserters, we could use:
pros
accepters
scientifically literate
thumbs-uppers
ants (as in Aesop's fable)

As you can see, it's really easy to come up with nasty labels to apply to "the other side" and self-congratulatory labels to apply to your own side. So I suggest that we instead use fair and balanced terms. 'Asserter' and 'denier' are fair and balanced.

Ted accuses me of plagiarizing from Steven Hawkings' A Brief History of Time. Ted, I have never read the book. There's no plagiarism. I suppose great minds think alike... ;-) Besides, are we discussing Chris Crawford or AGW?

Ted writes

Calling the AGW Theory is wrong. We may be giving it too much credence.

Maybe we should call it the �AGW Hypothesis�, which is a �guess based on observation�

No, that's not how the words are used in science. In scientific usage, the term 'theory' is confined to a large set of interconnected hypotheses. A 'hypothesis' is a statement of a single scientific relationship (although it can involve lots of complicated implications). An open-minded person considers just about everything to be a hypothesis.

Lastly, I remind everybody that this poll is uninformative because the definitions were skewed so as to put all reasonable people in the "skeptic" category.

As a postscript to my previous comment:

On the scale of "Catastrophic-Pragmatist" the veracity of the climatological evidence is less important than the "perceived threat" it presents.

This is a bit like "market sentiment" on the world stock markets. "Herd Mentality" will drive down the share price of companies with perfectly good financial fundamentals if the market swings that way.

When it comes to climate change the worlds media love catastrophy, nothing travels faster or sells better than bad news.

Big retailers are no fools so they pick up on this as a marketing angle, so they "Greenwash" themselves picking up on the media induced angst.
This is real positive feedback for the "Catastrophic" worldview, that self reinforces ad infinitum.

All retailers become "Carbon Neutral"

Politicians become very, very afraid of voters who shop in said retailers.

Conservative politicians desperately want to be seen to be green and touchy feely so they endorse this worldview. Short term.

There is no political party willing to take on the catastrophists, it's an election loser.

Or is it ?

Brett: Don't you have skeptics and deniers in reverse order? From my position it certainly seems like 77% of those responding to the site are deniers, not skeptics. But perhaps it's because I see the same names every day with the same message. I still believe that a lot of folks who call themselves skeptics are not, but hide behind the title to make themselves feel like they are somehow "scientific thinkers". If you have questions about how something is done or the outcome of some particular experiment, your a skeptic. If you spend 6 months attacking every post that is put up about climate change and cursing Al Gore out of hand, you are no skeptic. You are a denier, and most probably an ideolog. For my part I am happy to be a leftwing, tree-hugging, anti-capitalistic AGW alarmist. Did I leave any out?

Chris Crawford,

Call yourself an "asserter" if it makes you feel better. However I warn you it is a dangerous self-description, able to be used by those inclined to tease, due to the first three letters.

How long after the completely bogus definitions of this seriously misleading "survey" are forgotten, will the "results" -- "77% are skeptics" -- begin to be repeated, using the skeptic-equals-denier assumption connotation that most of the public assumes?

Anybody who seeks objectivity should be ashamed of this "survey" or its results.

Reply: BT, It was stictly for fun, nothing else. Relax.

By the by, Chris Crawford's was far more interesting. Why not create a SurveyMonkey poll, based on Chris's comment, and see what we get?

O.K. Kevinag,you got me,I'm a denier.

I did not vote and am registered as an AGW proponent. I do not require faith to reach my conclusions. The facts are so self-evident despite the cries form the deniers to the contrary.
This points out what I have suspected for a while and why I seldom read the comments anymore: The deniers dominate this column, mainly because they feel the need to shoot down or "spin" as someone earlier called it, the facts, data and theories so aptly brought to light by Brett. Those folks like me have no need to be edified by the negative voices that scream constantly in this commentary section.

But don't fret, read any comment sections on just about any Blog and you get a similar impression. I have stopped reading those as well. The conservatives or reactionaries drown out reason and reasonable discussion, but are the minority of the population. In fact, I am impressed by how smart Americans are in general, despite a lousy education system.

If its not too late Brett put me down as Denier

Brett, I think you opened up a can of worms with the poll, it started out innocent enough.

Based on the comments though, I think global warming is the least of man's problems. The "asserters" and the "deniers" are going to kill each other off before the planet gets its chance to do the deed itself.

Chill.

Brookline Tom, that's an excellent proposal (to create a special survey). So I followed your advice and created a survey at SurveyMonkey.com.

Click Here to take survey

It's a bit more extensive than my previous one. It asks some of the same basic questions about political orientation that my previous rhetorical survey asks, and it asks how much you agree with the basic AGW hypothesis. It also asks some questions to determine how much you know about the concepts behind this controversy. I'll warn you upfront, the questions cannot readily be answered by looking things up with Google. I went to a lot of effort to concoct questions that would be really easy for somebody who understands the basics, and almost impossible for somebody who doesn't. It should take less than five minutes to fill out the survey -- there are only eight political questions and six scientific questions, and they're all multiple choice.

I very much hope that everybody who responded here will give my survey a try. I think it will tell us some interesting things about opinions about global warming. I will likely announce it in a few other topics, just to make sure that everybody sees it -- assuming Brett has no objections. I'll make the results available to all in as much detail as requested, with the proviso that I won't reveal any individual's responses (I don't think I get access to that data anyway.)

It was stictly for fun, nothing else. Relax.

I'm sure that it was intended to be fun. I'm also sure it will be taken quite seriously by the Morano's of the world.
Reply: I doubt that. But, if you do see something mentioned about it let me know.

We can expect cites to these results to be widely published in and cited by contrarian blogs. We've already seen comments here, to the effect that "See? Only 12% of the population believe in AGW!" (they'll also use the "believe in" formulation).

This poll suffers from the same fatal flaw that the now-discredited Peiser study demonstrated, when Peiser attempted to challenge the earlier Oreskes study of scientific papers written about climate change. Schulte repeated Peiser's mistake in Schulte's subsequent and equally-failed attempt.

Both Schulte and Peiser manipulated the "results" by changing the definitions of "implicit agreement" and "neutral". After making these changes, they -- and outfits like "newsbusters" (who published the article cited by this blog) -- trumpeted these new results as evidence of a "major shift in the scientific community away from IPCC consensus in regards to man-made global warming."

We now know that they simply manipulated the definitions to get the results they wanted.

The comments of Naomi Oreskes that I quoted in that thread are quite relevant here:
Biologists today never write papers in which they explicitly say "we endorse evolution". Earth scientists never say "we explicitly endorse plate tectonics." This is because these things are now taken for granted. So when we read these papers and observed this pattern, we took this to be very significant.We realized that the basic issue was settled, and we observed that scientists had moved on to discussing details of the problem, mostly tempo and mode issues: how fast, how soon, in what manner, with what impacts, etc. (See Oreskes, 2007 for further discussion).

The "definitions" of this survey founder on this same reef. The journeyman scientist -- who, by an overwhelming margin, today accepts the AGW hypothesis -- can only answer "skeptic" to this survey.

That result, and choice of the word "skeptic", seriously distorts reality -- whether intended in "fun" or not.